As the original inflated claims of the proponents of personal budgets and personalisation are subjected to critical examination, so we can see the policy's foundations and knowledge base crumbling around us. As time passes, the picture gets worse, not better. It is difficult not to be struck by the solipsism of this development, which was embarked upon casually and without independent evidence. This in a policy area – social care – that has long been beset with problems and where the consequences for the many thousands of service users dependent upon it could be and often have been damaging and even life-threatening.

However, the responsibility for this ill-conceived and poorly evidenced policy really has to be lain at the door of the politicians and policymakers who rushed to implement it. There are always enthusiasts who will over-claim for their pet projects. It is the job of policymakers to negotiate such difficulties. In this case, the promise of getting better for less, in a chronically underfunded field of policy, clearly overrode ministers’ better judgement.

As one of this book's contributors, Helga Pile, reminds us, discussion about personalisation has never been an inclusive or equal one. Some voices, notably, the voices pushing determinedly for it, have consistently been privileged. As she observes, the policy was sold on anecdote, but practitioners were not given an equal hearing. Nor, indeed, were service users, or carers, analysts or activists who did not take the party line.

This book represents an exception to that rule. Here, instead, diverse and critical voices, voices of experience, have been given the chance to offer their views on the theory and practice of personal budgets and personalisation. Here, a much richer and more critical and helpful picture emerges.

First, we are given warts-and-all accounts of some of the realities behind the implementation of the policy. Thus, Jim Main sets out the way in which the move to personalisation in Glasgow has been strongly associated with reductions in support and increases in bureaucratisation, while wrongly rationalised by its leaders as a way of fairly distributing (reduced) resources. Accounts from Pat Stack, Sarah Carr and Helga Pile highlight the top-down nature of the reform, which has frequently excluded practitioners, service users and carers.